My name is Eliot Phillips and I’m looking for engineering work. I’ve got 15 years experience building and writing about custom hardware. In the last few years the work I’ve done has run the gamut of simple prototypes to full production items for public consumption. I tend to focus on the electrical engineering aspects of projects, but I have a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. I enjoy getting into interesting projects on the ground floor and collaborating with others to steer them towards success.

The world has changed in the last year and I’ve changed the way I work to make sure I’m still delivering what people need. On a recent project, I was brought onboard virtually to design the control system for a food robotics platform. The robot arm already existed; I needed to design all the other systems: managing power flow, switching liquid solenoids, triggering pneumatics, driving stepper motors, networking for remote control. I created the schematic, assembled full panel at home, wrote the PLC firmware (a new skill I had to learn), and tested it with the individual machine components. I then worked on-site with a coworker to verify that our separate systems were working together as expected and moved from there to the final installation.

While being remote certainly had its bumps, we put extra effort into designing a modular plug-and-play system that would make for quick assembly requiring only a few people. We also built in safeguards to make the prototype more reliable during testing without needing to bring in more people. There was also an emphasis on documentation and knowledge sharing to make the final prototype easier to use. I was happy to mentor junior engineers throughout this project as well.

I really enjoyed this build and I’m looking for more interesting work now. Check out my resume if you’d like to know more about my past work. Explore the the posts tagged “portfolio” to see more things I’ve made. Please get in touch!